Hearth.com Home Page 11-05-1996 from the Internet Wayback Machine

[Jags]

The Mac pretty much sucked until 1986 when they came up with the Mac Plus (1 meg ram) with a 10 meg hard drive. That made it truly useful.

Dunno - I spent lots of time behind the screen of an Apple IIe. It did save me some time a couple of times. When the teachers told you to write "I will not speak in class" 500 times, I asked if I could type it. "Yes". 3 lines of code later and I was done.

 

[Delta-T]

I still have my Apple IIe. It keeps my old desk from flying away.

 

[webbie]

Dunno - I spent lots of time behind the screen of an Apple IIe. It did save me some time a couple of times. When the teachers told you to write "I will not speak in class" 500 times, I asked if I could type it. "Yes". 3 lines of code later and I was done.

LOL.
And ever since, you've been sitting in a chair....ah, brain augmentation! Revenge of the Nerds!

 

[Jags]

If memory serves me proper like, I believe 1978/79 would have been the time frame I first laid fingers on a computer keyboard.

 

[MasterMech]

Ahhh...memories. You guys have me lusting for my 1200 baud modem and 20 meg hard drive. " What in the world would you ever USE that much memory on." Remember using cassette tapes and a recorder set to "record" for memory.

IBM 8088 - man I was cool when I had that thing. Punch cards predate me, but not by much.

Hearthnet.net - I remember that. Just a lurker then.

Ok, I'm in too!

First machine - NEC PC8500 running CP/M ( a neutered proprietary version at that!) with 32K of RAM (user acessible). Processor speed was measured in single digit Mhz with decimals and that actually mattered! Learned to word process with WordStar and a lot of ^ codes. Machine was dated 1983. Had a 300 baud modem built in but you could turn it down to 120? if that was too much speed for ya. Had a 128K memory cartridge that had a button cell battery to keep the RAM contents alive. Damned if that battery didn't chit without warning! I think I still have that machine somewhere......

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/nec8500/

Graduated (and fried) to whatever early 80's PC hardware a family friend would give me for free. Taught myself GW-BASIC and QBASIC instead of playing Nintendo and got very proficient. Sadly my computer interests died shortly after my HS graduation and I moved on to more mechanical pursuits instead....

All of the above took place sometime in the late 90's, !

Some of my favorite childhood games are now abandonware!

And Jags... one of our primary machines at work is still controlled via, you guessed it, punch cards. (Machine was originally designed/built in the early 70's) Our electronics techs just love rebuilding those card readers! We have a fleet of 8+ readers with 4 actively running at all times. Just keep pullin' and rebuilding them.

 

[webbie]

If memory serves me proper like, I believe 1978/79 would have been the time frame I first laid fingers on a computer keyboard.

That was before my time!

I didn't have computers in school or business.....Stoveworks ran fine with paper receipts. But my bro was into tech stuff and had a very early Apple I with a casette drive. He convinced me to buy a computer in 1982, and I decided on the IBM because....well, it was the latest and greatest.

I do remember in the mid-70's when I was working in Philly - some shop windows were advertising the first PC's. They were called PET (commodores early models).....

Realistically, computers in Stoveworks were not used for very much until I discovered Filemaker, an early db. That finally allowed me to use it for receipts, leads, etc.
The early macs had a networking system called localtalk which allowed communication over regular telephone wire - it was used, among other things, to hook a network to an Apple Laser Printer. Filemaker was set up for multi-user using localtalk - which then made us all able to see the same data, etc.
It was probably 1986-87 before we really started to use them fully.

 

[chuckie5fingers]

We had a commodore 64 and the floppies where huge and loud ! I don't have pics of it so this will have to do. We thought it was so cool cuz we could change the background colors it was sooo high tech to us lol

My buddies and I all had comm 64's as well. I was in 8th grade in 1983 and w/i about 2 weeks of our "computer lab" opening,(commodore computers as well) we had hacked into the hard drives and changed all the key commands around. We literally had the computer teachers going nuts cause they had no idea how we little 8th graders were able to hack the system. good times
chuck

 

[begreen]

The Mac was black and white and that cut it out for me. I wanted to work in color which forced me over to the Amiga and then the dark side with my first PC.

 

[fossil]

Actually, in 1962/1963 I was in Jr. High School, in an "accelerated" math class. Our teacher was a Mr. Yost. He offered to teach about the nascent world of computers to whoever wanted to learn...after hours, then with visits to the Cal Berkeley "Computer Center" on Saturdays. I signed up. He started us out with Machine Language, and only after we'd gotten at least a rudimentary grasp of that and Assembly Language did he hand out the Fortran manuals...as I recall, it was Fortran IV. The Computer Center was in a large old home on Fraternity Row. The IBM card punch machines were downstairs. The IBM 1620 and card reader and printer were upstairs in the Living/Dining Rooms. We each had to make a deck of cards that would teach basic arithmetic to the computer every time it was started up, because it didn't remember much of anything. Then we could get it to solve quadratic equations and similar enigmas. I'm really glad Mr. Yost did that for us...and I thank my mom for picking me up late from school and driving me into Berkeley on Saturdays. Rick

 

[BrotherBart]

Way ahead of me there Rick. In 62/63 I was herding cows after school and on weekends. Never even heard of computers until several years later and then that was all it was Heard of them.

 

[webbie]

Actually, in 1962/1963 I was in Jr. High School, in an "accelerated" math class. Our teacher was a Mr. Yost. He offered to teach about the nascent world of computers to whoever wanted to learn...after hours, then with visits to the Cal Berkeley "Computer Center" on Saturdays. I signed up. He started us out with Machine Language, and only after we'd gotten at least a rudimentary grasp of that and Assembly Language did he hand out the Fortran manuals...as I recall, it was Fortran IV. The Computer Center was in a large old home on Fraternity Row. The IBM card punch machines were downstairs. The IBM 1620 and card reader and printer were upstairs in the Living/Dining Rooms. We each had to make a deck of cards that would teach basic arithmetic to the computer every time it was started up, because it didn't remember much of anything. Then we could get it to solve quadratic equations and similar enigmas. I'm really glad Mr. Yost did that for us...and I thank my mom for picking me up late from school and driving me into Berkeley on Saturdays. Rick

Wow, you must have met some of the folks in the book.......What the Doormouse said.
Good thing you signed up and shipped out, or you'd have been a 60's and 70's radical (most of the guys that took over the reins of computing out there were so).......

You'd probably like the book - although they center it more on the Stanford and Palo Alto scene than Berkeley.
It was a interesting mix of folks - because much of the research was paid for by the Defense Dept, yet it was fairly free form - they didn't want anything particular at the start other than experimentation.

Later, during Vietnam, all the students rebelled when they heard that the computers were being used for war gaming and other such stuff.

The guy credited in the book with starting the PC revolution was Fred Moore, whose dad was a high-up Pentagon muckety muck...but Fred was a famous anti-war activist. Fred was like a Ghandi figure - starting one-man crusades. When he was arrested and made the papers, Dad flew out and proclaimed "my son is his own man"......good for dad!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Moore_(activist)

 

[MasterMech]

We had a commodore 64 and the floppies where huge and loud ! I don't have pics of it so this will have to do. We thought it was so cool cuz we could change the background colors it was sooo high tech to us lol

Those are 5.25" floppies? I remember those, lol. I have never run across the original (8 inch?) floppies. My Epson PC (80286 and a Hercules Monochrome Display, Orange on Black! ) had a 40 MB Hard Drive that makes my Stihls quiet by comparison.

 

[fossil]

Wow, you must have met some of the folks in the book...

Hah! No way. I was 14-15 y/o, learning the very basics of programming through the good graces of a forward-looking Junior High math teacher, that's all. I was very nearly oblivious to the computer R&D going on across the bay (I don't think "Silicon Valley" had earned its nickname yet), and I knew nary a soul involved with it. The next time I had any significant involvement with computers was more than a decade later ('74-'77), working on my undergrad degree in ME at the University of New Mexico...lots of Fortan programming, then turn in my card deck to the folks in the computer center, wait a day or so for my output to be available...debug, punch new cards, repeat as necessary. Didn't own my own computer until the HP-85 I showed in a previous post, and that was another 4 or 5 years down the road. I've had one computer or another pretty much since then...but the closest I've ever come to knowing anyone involved in any aspect of the business was my ex-wife, who for some years was a sales rep for HP, back about '81-'86. What great perks she got in those glory days!

 

[Jags]

Those are 5.25" floppies? I remember those, lol. I have never run across the original (8 inch?) floppies. My Epson PC (80286 and a Hercules Monochrome Display, Orange on Black! ) had a 40 MB Hard Drive that makes my Stihls quiet by comparison.

I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.

 

[MasterMech]

I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.

I'm good, but thanks!

 

[Jags]

I'm good, but thanks!

Awww-- come on, I will even throw in a box of BRAND NEW 5-1/4" to sweeten the deal.

 

[MasterMech]

Awww-- come on, I will even throw in a box of BRAND NEW 5-1/4" to sweeten the deal.

I was tied to a chair in the backyard as my computer "museum" was hauled out and destroyed in front of me. I wept for days. I have been sober for 8 years now so I'll pass on the free box of 5-1/4"s.

I know a select few of my artifacts have survived but I don't dare access them for fear of revealing their location.

 

[Don2222]

I could probably find you a stack of 8" if you are interested.

I used the 8" floppies at work, they were really new and so much easier than the 9 track Mag Tapes. I used the 7 track real tapes but those new 9 Track drives with the auto load feature wow that was great! In college I learned the 8 bit Octal on the Dec PDP-11 much newer than the Dec PDP-8, then Fortran IV with batch processing using the IBM-029 card punch to type up our programs. I always had plenty of EOFs End of File cards! One typo and then another 3 days to get the program run so I could get more compile errors. Then after the compile errors were fixed we worked on the runtime errors !!
Did you ever empty the card punch bin with all those punched holes! Great confetti!

In High School we learned the Olivetti before we learned basic programming using a Teletype with paper tape reader!

Olivetti Programma 101
http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/museum/programma101.html

Teletype
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype.html